Försvarets återkomst till Gotland - En modell för snabb förmågetillväxt

After decades of disarmament and cost-efficiency rationalizations, Swedish defense authorities face a new challenge in rapidly building new defense capabilities to deal with a changing threat. The traditional planning and governance approaches within and among authorities, however, are not designed for this new challenge. This report presents results from a study on the defense forces' redeployment to the Gotland island. It aims to provide policy makers with insights into how new defense capabilities can be built quickly in response to a political decision. The field research is based primarily on interview data and qualitative analysis. The rapid capability-building was made possible through cooperation among military and civilian organizations that complemented each other in the creation of societal value that no single actor themselves could produce. Instead, a socalled value system of these actors must be created, a process of five phases (i.e. envisioning, sense-making, experimenting, prototyping, and scaling and diffusion) driven by three critical resources: - Key persons with a mandate to lead - A task force, a group that co-operates during a limited time - Expertise on local conditions None of these resources is more important than the others-rather, it is the combination of them that creates the necessary dynamics for rapid capability growth. Furthermore, the time between the decision to redeploy and the actual redeployment was less than two years-an unusually short time, as defense authorities traditionally work with long planning cycles. The report shows that creating a value system is critical to enabling the rapid increase of defense capabilities. The fact that the goals of and implementation plan for the redeployment could not be defined in advance points to the importance of a process-oriented planning philosophy, because it enables actors in the emergent value system to benefit from the constantly evolving experience of redeployment on the ground. This insight is of general relevance to all decision-makers and authorities who deal with new societal challenges.